Long Cold Road
by Atolm2000
Summary: Very much preseries Kouryuu POV. Koumyou may've only passed on one solid teaching...but who's to say he didn't find ways to slip in other lessons in with his odd sense of humor?


(Let's see if it's nice if I upload in .doc format…)

Eerryeah….Kouryuu-pov…so if you can't tell this is pre-series, you prooollly haven't seen it yet ;.

Me no own these people.

(And no, it won't. -;;; is a simple, freaking TAB too much to ask for people? So that paragraphs are discernable without putting those damned spaces in everywhere? And maybe some punctuation marks that are feasibly usable for making section-breaks, or do I have to, yanno, put in a row of parentheses, with maybe a golf ball lost in the parentheses, or something?)

Last week I first saw snow, and now I never wanted to see another flake. The sky was white, the broad, empty road was white, the land to either side was white, the trees were mostly white except for bits here and there of needles and dark bark showing through, which I was seeing through a wad of scarves, blanket-cloaks, and winter gear that'd probably doubled my size, and it was still cold. With all the snow, it's impossible to hear anything further than a few feet away; everything's dead silent.

"Master Sanzo? Why are we in the mountains?"

He shrugs slightly, breaking trail in the snow ahead of me. "The road happened to be heading this way."

There was probably more to it; he never explains his reasons in his first answer. "...Wasn't there a fork heading south?"

"Often there's troubles with people falling ill in the mountains in winter, and the weather causes extra trouble with supplies."

"Is this area even inhabited?"

He does pause at that, just long enough to give me a quizzical glance.

"There's no tracks on this road but ours, we haven't seen any signs of anyone since that crossroads a few hours ago - it seems weird for there to be a road this size, this empty."

He stays quiet, but doesn't stop, leaving me wondering what's going on exactly, before he continues on amiably.

"It's very easy to figure things out logically, based on what one can see at the time, without ever realizing that there's something else you might've missed that would be the difference between your reasoning and belief about what's going on being the truth, or just a false but reasonable-sounding assumption." Did I do something wrong? He's keeping the same quiet calm and sedate pace. "You should be cautious of being too quick to put names and explanations to things until you know, from what you can see and find, for absolute certain that it's the true option; until then, it's nothing more than a logical assumption, and relying on it, rather than on observing what's actually going on, can cause you to lose sight of the truth. Many of the troubles of the world, small and large, come from people clinging to and acting on such assumptions." Okay, something I said must've been wrong, but I still don't have the slightest clue what led to this tangent, and he's still speaking as calmly as if he were commenting on the weather. "For example, were you to come back this way in summer and plan to follow this same route," he waves airily at the road and the trees, "You would end up forced to make a very long and unprepared for detour, because you can't walk on the rapids when the river thaws."

I stop walking, staring at the ground. River? I must've just heard him wrong. "...We're standing on what?"

"A frozen river; the rapids are around here in summer. That's why there's no wagon traffic, and few people taking this road; the ice is perfectly safe to walk on, but might not support a cart and horse, or too much traffic at once." Well...that would explain why the trees curve over the road...river... more than usual. It's ice over a river that's fairly good-sized, now that I know it's not a road and the clear area's the river. The river's probably still flowing as usual right under the ice I'm standing on; Koumyou's slowed down, watching me over his shoulder, but he hasn't entirely stopped, and as much as I don't want to be on the river, I don't want to be left alone either, and it'd be longer to get somewhere warm to backtrack and take the real road, than to just keep going this way, so I swallow the flutter of panic at being on water and hurry to catch up.


End file.
